What was black swan really about

The production company has not seen a lot of visitors, and Thomas wants to change things up. Lily Mila Kunis a ballerina from San Francisco who has come to join the group for this production. Nina auditions for the role of the Swan Queen and Thomas tells her that if he were casting only the White Swan, it would be Nina.

Lily enters the audition room, and this causes Nina to stumble. Thomas ends the audition. She goes back crying to her mother who consoles her and puts her to sleep. On the way back home Nina notices another woman in black. Nina is at the onset of a Dissociative Identity Disorder. The character is to throw the audience off. The next day Nina dolls herself up to have a word with Thomas and says that she has completed her practice of the Black Swan act.

Nina thanks him and is about to leave. Thomas notes that Nina clearly came with the intention to change his mind, to try and seduce him, in the mildest sense of the word.

Thomas wants Nina to lose herself, that is how she can become the Black Swan. Thomas forcefully kisses Nina and she bits him. Thomas is known to be a jerk but this moment makes him realize that Nina probably is the right choice. She heads out, and the results are soon put up.

Innocently, thinking that Veronica as made the part she congratulates her. Many assume that Nina must have slept with Thomas to get the part. Nina has been developing a rash on her back.

This is not a rash. Her mother comes in with a cake to celebrate. Nina, avoiding the calories, says no. Her mother gets annoyed, and so Nina has a little. The scene again shows the kind of control her mother has on Nina. Things that never really happen.

Thomas tells Nina that he saw a flash of the Black Swan in her and he wants her to give him more of that bite. There is a banquet thrown to announce the retirement of Beth, and Nina the new Swan Queen. Beth is terribly annoyed for being patronized and leaves. At the restroom, Nina meets Lily who seems friendly. Beth says that Thomas always considered Nina to be a frigid little girl.

Looks like that bite really changed things up. Nina leaves with Thomas to his place. He asks her to go home and touch herself as a homework assignment. He wants Nina to connect with her sensuality which is crucial for the role. Nina sees her mother crying in front of her art. Her mother knows about the scratching habit that Nina has. She attributes it to the pressure of the role. Her mother is not wrong about this. Nina wakes up the next morning and begins touching herself but soon notices that her mom is on a chair sleeping.

Looks like she has been there all night to keep an eye on Nina. After the party, Beth walks into the road and gets hit by a car. Thomas explains how everything Beth does comes from some dark impulse. Which is what made her so thrilling to watch. But the same thing also makes her self-destructive. This dialogue here is pretty much laying out what is going to happen to Nina.

Thomas still finds Nina to be stiff, and not letting go. Thomas sends everyone off and continues the rehearsal alone with Nina. He seduces Nina asking her to respond to his touch. She does. Thomas tells her that this was him seducing her, but it needs to be the other way around. Lily meets Nina later and sees her crying. It also appears that Nina is infatuated with Thomas.

Lily tells Thomas to go easy on Nina. Next day, Thomas is making Nina repeat her act without any corrections.

Thomas wants her to be strong and fight. He mentions that Lily said to go easy on Nina. Lily comes by to meet Nina. Nina retaliates and goes to the door. Lily apologizes about talking to Thomas and wants to make it up by taking her out. It's a nightmare for them to be replaced once they've made it to the top and they get these roles. And in response to the "but dancers do eat though, don't they? And I think a lot of them do, a lot of them are healthy. I'm not making a blanket statement at all.

But there are a lot of eating disorders. I don't know if it's more prevalent in certain companies, but when I talked to the women, they said pretty much every dancer in the company has had some bout of eating disorder. There are certainly cases of people who are healthy through and through, but, look, I did ballet for a year and just by the ballet you don't get skinny.

You get fit, but there's effort required to look emaciated. Moreover, Portman continued, "It's a very obsessive-compulsive art. There's so much ritual in it: doing the barre every day, prepping the shoes. There are so many compulsive behaviors which lead to virtuosity. I think you would see it in violinists or computer programmers, or anyone who's really wonderful at something—this obsessive repetition until you get something right.

But then there are the negative manifestations, like eating disorders, which are totally connected to that. After dominating the big screen in the s and s, Winona Ryder hadn't starred in a movie for awhile when she showed up in the small but poignant role of Beth "a wonderful little juicy hamburger of a role," she said on the U.

So yes, not entirely unlike Ryder herself making way for then-newcomers like Portman as her own career hit that Hollywood gray area though without the bitter cocktail party confrontations. And now I'm I remember when I was younger, I couldn't wait to be older, because I was always the kid on the set, I was always younger than everyone else. And now I'm older than a lot of the people I work with.

I've been doing this for 25 years, which is so strange. Ryder, a deeply emotive, sensitive actor, got so into her part as the spiteful ex-star that she actually felt guilty after her 10 days on set were over—and sent Portman an apology! She also recalled, "The scene where I trash my dressing room was my last scene. I remember my first boyfriend used to smash everything—at 18 everything is dramatic. So I took an Evian bottle and tried to break it really meekly.

I couldn't do it and then he made fun of me. And even in that dressing room scene I was like, 'Sorry! Meanwhile, a quick glance at the encyclopedia of pop culture infamy reminds us that Ryder was 17 when she started dating Johnny Depp , which she has called her " first real relationship.

Portman, of course, wasn't the only already perfectly fit actress in the cast who lost 20 pounds to look more believably like a professional ballet dancer.

Mila Kunis , who played Lily, Nina's rival-frenemy-lover-figment-of-her-imagination, ultimately weighed in at 95 pounds. Talking to Coming Soon mid-production in December , the That '70s Show star admitted, "I'm so hungry all the time. I just want to eat and not work out and not do anything. I plan on doing nothing. I end Black Swan in February and I plan to be a couch potato for about a month. Aronofsky thought of her for the role after liking what he saw in Forgetting Sarah Marshall , so no audition necessary, but they discussed the character multiple times via Skype before she headed to New York to start filming the movie she called "an anomaly in every aspect of life.

I don't recommend anybody ever doing it. Not being a dancer and having no previous training, "I had to get en pointe [balance in toe shoes] within three months, and so to get en pointe you almost have to fake it," she explained.

And part of faking it was being super-skinny. Like it was one of those things, for the first time in my life, I got a food delivery service," she explained. It was a 1,or-less calorie diet a day It's awful, 1, calories And then I smoked. Though Barbara Hershey 's Erica, Nina's helicopter mom, isn't exactly a wellspring of emotional support for her daughter, Aronofsky did want them to feel invested in their relationship.

So, Portman told Collider, "he had Barbara write letters to me in character, as Erica to Nina, for the first portion of the film, that he would hand to me on important days of shooting that I should feel my mother.

Barbara wrote really gorgeous letters that were in character and really gave a sense of our history, our love and our connection. Sadly, one of Portman and Kunis' coaches, Georgina Parkinson —a British ballerina who starred in Swan Lake and was later a coach at American Ballet Theatre— died of cancer at the age of 71 two weeks before they started filming.

While in theory Nina may have been getting intimate with herself, onscreen she's succumbing to Lily's headily relaxed charms. At first, she is rightfully afraid of these images; as she continues to embrace her degeneration, she also embraces these illusions. She begins to detach herself from the rational and instead choses the fantastical, reveling when she imagines her arms turning into wings at the height of her mania.

Did Nina die at the end? You can surmise her fate by following the theme of transformation and duality.

She progresses, she begins to become more worldly, losing her virginity and coming in to her own. However, her self-exploration comes at a cost: her relationship with her mother and possibly her own life. How can we be reasonably sure that she is dead? The film itself explores one final duality: life and death. And in the ballet, the White Swan dies whereas the Black Swan lives. Nina may have literally given the performance of a lifetime. Martin Wilson May 17, Innocence versus Sensuality One of most easily spotted oppositions is the contrast between the virginal Nina and the sexual Lily.